Ferenc Sánta is one of the most special figures in recent Hungarian literature. He made his debut in 1954 with his first piece of writing, the short story Sokan voltunk (lit. We Were Many), which attracted considerable attention and went on to become a foundational work of modern Hungarian short fiction. He subsequently published some two dozen short stories, three novels, and a dramatic adaptation of one of them – all within a period extending only to the end of the 1960s. A handful of his journalistic writings also appeared, he gave interviews, and in the 1970s occasional excerpts from works in progress were published in the cultural supplement of Népszava, yet no new completed work was released during his lifetime. We also know that on one occasion he destroyed a substantial portion of his manuscripts.
Silence can have many causes and invite many interpretations, especially when it follows a conspicuously successful phase of an oeuvre that also resonated internationally. Such causes are usually political and/or psychological in nature. Explanations tend either to register creative exhaustion or – although the same may well be suspected in the background – to mythologise the refusal to speak. The most familiar example of the latter from the same period is the reception of Géza Ottlik, who was elevated to a cult figure already during his lifetime, in the 1970s.
The literary establishment was far less benevolent towards Ferenc Sánta. Perhaps this was because – at least seemingly – no clear paths led from his work to postmodern prose. Marxist and Marxist-inflected criticism in the decades following 1945 held epic prose most directly accountable to its own conception of realism, and although this criticism gradually became more permissive over time, this was due above all not to Ottlik or Miklós Mészöly, but to the work of Tibor Déry, Imre Sarkadi and Ferenc Sánta, who also paved the way for the slow acceptance of Ottlik and Mészöly.
In Sánta’s oeuvre – a body of work amounting to roughly a thousand pages – the wholeness of a writerly world is revealed. It is at once deeply bound to its historical moment and attentive to enduring human values. Many notable works of the 1950s and 1960s have since faded; Sánta’s finest short stories and novels, however, have stood the test of time. The questions they pose and the answers they propose continue to engage readers today. The “time out of joint” was not something that had to be confronted only in Hamlet’s Denmark or in Hungary in 1945, 1952 or 1956, but on many occasions since. And we now know that what Hamlet could not achieve can never be fully achieved by anyone: time out of joint can at best be brought closer to its proper place. There is no state of rest in existence; thus, amid the tangle of questions and answers it is always difficult to find one’s bearings with integrity. The most reliable point of reference may be that humanity whose foundation lies in moral values refined over millennia.
The early short stories are the products of a unified authorial stance and tone. Written in the first person singular, they are either directly lived experiences or narratives heard and made personal through imaginative identification. In these stories, not only the family of the protagonist but also the life situation and destiny are essentially the same. The central motif is poverty – a degree of destitution in which even securing the next mouthful of food is not always possible. Hunger and eating appear not merely as motifs but repeatedly as elements that determine structure and plot progression. In Sokan voltunk (lit. We Were Many), the grandfather voluntarily prepares to die so that his starving grandchildren may receive a larger share of food. People condemned to poverty are depicted as viewing life as a task to be struggled through, one in which they must stand their ground whatever happens. Strict moral laws, internalised almost in the blood, compel them to live according to human goodness, love and decency, supported by two pillars: work and family. Fidelity to these constitutes the essence of humanity. There is no life situation – the writer suggests – in which one could betray one’s ideals or forget the duty to remain human.
Most of the short stories are defined by tragedy. In Sokan voltunk (lit. We Were Many), the father must make a decision in a diabolical situation: he must accept the grandfather’s preparation for death so that his children may have a greater chance of survival. He is not choosing between good and evil, but between two values; whichever decision he makes, he must acknowledge the destruction of values. Both concern the most elemental of all rights: the right to life. In such an extreme situation, the decision cannot be avoided. Here the motif of choice still appears almost instinctively; the ethical struggle begins only after the forced decision has been made, and we witness the hero’s purification. From this perspective, the central figure of the story is the father. The grandfather’s decision is unequivocal: he assumes death for the sake of the new generation; his act is heroic self-sacrifice, his fate pure tragedy. The young boy, both observer and narrator, is expelled from his former – albeit relative – protection and comes to know the “order” of the world, that is, its cruelty and its lack of respect even for life itself. This recognition is a crucial stage on the path to adulthood, an awakening to the tragic nature of existence.
The father has long been aware of all this; for him, the approval of value-destruction – allowing his own parent to go to death – becomes an inescapable sin, a tragic transgression accepted by social practice but regarded as normal neither by the community nor by the father himself. He tends the fire unwaveringly throughout the night so that the flame – a purifying fire – may grant him absolution, and at the same time burn as a sacrificial fire for the grandfather. Among ancient peoples, particularly nomadic ones, sending the elderly to their deaths was a widespread custom, as was the cremation of the dead.
In several stories of the first collection, Téli virágzás (lit. Winter Blooming) published in 1956, family cohesion, mutual dependence and love become guiding motifs that are at times capable of neutralising the cruelty of the world, thereby providing increased strength for endurance. The family becomes the chief guarantee of preserving humanity. Here this motif expresses a protest, in the name of instinctive yet genuine popular humanism, against the abstract, merely verbal humanism of the age. The writer does not oppose human social existence in general, but rather bad historical practice. The action unfolds in the more or less balladised recent past, the period before the Second World War, yet the timeless force of the ballad form also enables it to refer symbolically to the contemporary present – the era of the cult of personality, in which human values appeared only in abstraction, and the enforcement of norms remained a promise for the future. It is a sad fact that upon entering the twenty-first century, and already in the writer’s posthumous era, we once again experience poverty and hunger on a societal scale, and indeed the erosion of popular humanism. The relevance of Ferenc Sánta’s oeuvre is reinforced not only by its aesthetic value but also by contemporary experience.
The extreme distortions of socialism, together with the revolution of 1956 and its suppression, made it urgent to examine the nature of power and to clarify the relationship between power and morality. The question was placed in a world-historical context: is there progress in human history, do revolutions have meaning? At the far end of this meditation, in the creator’s crisis-ridden intellectual and psychological state, the motif of the cruel world intensified and became dominant. Here the possibility of human endurance is far more limited; cruelty most often destroys even the most elementary human values. The individual, defencelessly exposed to power, can usually only resign himself to his fate; his struggle – even for his family – becomes futile and thus meaningless.
In the short story Tyúk és kakas (lit. Hen and Rooster), set during World War I, the owner of a farmstead in no man’s land between the fronts is stripped of all his possessions by Italian and Austrian soldiers acting in tacit agreement; when the fighting resumes, his house is reduced to rubble, and two of his sons also die on another front. This peasant symbolises the oppressed, defenceless masses who can do nothing against their situation. His sole possibility is the preservation of physical existence amid the storms of history. Here this idea appears as an absolute truth. Later stories present the same notion with a critical edge under the conditions of World War II and fascism (A Müller-család halála [lit. The Death of the Müller Family]; Nácik – [lit. Nazis]; Halálnak halála – [lit. The Death of Death]).
In the decade following 1956, the period of fascism and the vision of nuclear war proved suitable for the sharpened representation of disillusionment with Bolshevik-type socialism and a crisis of the spirit. Only in this way could the absurdity of the world be depicted with a claim to validity. In some cases, it was indeed the horrors experienced during World War II that led writers to this thematic motif, later reinforced by the Bolshevik dictatorship – this was true of János Pilinszky, whom well-meaning editors even asked after 1956 to write one or two “anti-fascist” poems to make publication possible. In Sánta’s case, the situation was reversed: it was the experience of the 1950s and the bloody suppression of 1956 that led him to the theme. By the time he recognised its model-like quality, however, he had already passed beyond his deepest worldview crisis. Consequently, these stories no longer assert the exclusivity of the world’s alienating cruelty. A Müller-család halála (lit. The Death of the Müller Family) presents a clear counterforce, and Halálnak halála (lit. The Death of Death) an even stronger one, already in its title.
In this story, dedicated to the memory of Federico García Lorca, two prisoners – two humanist intellectuals – are escorted by a guard into the city, where they are to be executed. The guard accidentally falls into a river, but the prisoners rescue him and even return his weapon. They could escape, yet instead they save another. They put the principles of humanism into practice: saving a life and sacrificing themselves. The result of their action is the “death” of tyranny, oppression and anti-humanism. As the writer interprets it: “The two heroes of the story did not desire martyrdom but strove for total victory. Let there be no doubt: they act deliberately and consciously, to such an extent that they are not ashamed to say that humanity triumphs in them and through them. There are many ways to resist tyranny, but this diferrence is still one and the same: to break it, to destroy it.” (Miért választottam? [lit. Why Did I Choose It?])
Like the debut story, this narrative possesses a certain mythic, fairy-tale quality, as does Isten a szekéren (lit. God on the Cart), which gave its title to a selected volume. The story is very simple: a peasant travelling home on his cart notices that someone is riding with him. The unknown old man claims to be God and, at the carter’s request, performs a small miracle: he opens a chasm in the road and then makes it disappear. The taciturn old man asks for and receives lodging for the night. In the gently melancholy, playful atmosphere of the story, realistic and unreal elements blend subtly. The carter is named Ferenc Sánta, and the parable speaks of humankind in the spirit of writerly ethics. Human duality is revealed: faith and disbelief, wonder and frailty. The “divine” in the human and the human in “God” are disclosed, and the assertion of solidarity gestures towards the horizon in which “All men shall become brothers”.
The modified authorial message after 1956 could no longer be expressed in the earlier, lyrical type of short story. For a time, all lyricism disappears. From the summer of 1956 onwards, the new works consciously sought to grasp truths of general validity in space and time. In dramatic situations, the perspective is intellectual; parabolic construction is frequent; poetic and linguistic devices are more varied. In the early works, it was primarily tone, style and the rhythm of prose that evoked folk poetry. This remained, albeit more restrained. More deeply internalised, however, was an influence deriving from the worldview and characterisation of folk poetry. Instead of the song, the fairy tale and the ballad increasingly became models.
In this second, post-1956 phase, the movement of Sánta’s worldview is shown even more complexly in the three novels written in the first half of the 1960s. In terms of conception, the first was Az áruló (lit. The Traitor), though it was published last (in 1966). This novel confronts the philosophy-of-history questions inevitably raised by 1956, seeking the possibilities of ethical historical action. The story, explicitly constructed as a meditation, is set in the era of the Hussite wars. It presents four forms of conduct: the revolutionary, the reformer, the disillusioned cynical intellectual, and the “little man” (the peasant) who merely suffers the storms of history. Each stance has a certain justification, yet none becomes absolute in the depicted situation, since each bears serious fault – especially Václav, the revolutionary who proclaims the happiness of the people. This Hussite warrior is a fanatic: he seeks to lead by force and yet abandons the people. The writer also depicts critically the peasant who personifies the masses. Not only does Václav betray and abandon him, but the peasant also abandons the revolutionary struggle, renouncing participation and the shaping of his own fate through perpetual flight. Yet he has an acceptable excuse: the millennia-long impoverishment and lack of consciousness of the masses, and the obligations of everyday life, the maintenance of the family. The novel presents a historical stalemate – the moment when the cause of revolution and that of the people diverge. The writer, both within the novel and as author, does not wish to serve only one cause, yet the historical situation would demand it. Owing to the character of the age and its painfully acute questions, the novel of debate is somewhat unfair to the representative of the reformist path, the imperial soldier Zsitomir, and it rejects too unequivocally the philosophical cynicism of Eusebius the priest, which might also be seen as gentle Epicureanism. The priest represents indifference to the affairs of the world, and at that time Sánta regarded this, alongside fanaticism, as the greatest sin. At the same time, the priest too – like every character here and in the other novels – possesses a partial truth.
Decades later, Ferenc Sánta himself revised his views: “It is not certain that in our past centuries we did right to set revolution and reform against one another. Either revolution or reform. […] Reformist action, in its quality, can bring about a change so profound that it possesses revolutionary value, achieving what in earlier historical periods could be attained only through revolution.” (Conversation with Judit Kuczka, 1989.)
Whereas Az áruló (lit. The Traitor) primarily embeds philosophy-of-history views in novelistic form, Az ötödik pecsét (lit. The Fifth Seal), published in 1963, embodies ethical ones. The ethical charge pushes into the background the differing worldviews and degrees of commitment or non-commitment of the characters; thus, in Sánta’s intention, the primary issue is not whether they commit themselves to a particular philosophical or political idea, but whether they listen to the faculty of judgement present in every human being. The title refers to the Bible: in the Book of Revelation, the breaking of the seals marks the first major stage of a world-historical vision. When the fifth seal is broken, those become visible “who were slain for the word of God”. These martyrs cry out for vengeance, only to learn that many more will yet become victims like themselves.
The action takes place in December 1944, in German-occupied Budapest. We follow the conversation of a group at a pub table – four ordinary small craftsmen of integrity. They seek an answer to the question of how one ought to live and, under oppressive historical circumstances, accept the parable that, as on the fairy-tale island, in reality too one can be only a tyrant or a slave, nothing else. The reader also learns that the watchmaker who tells the parable, Mr Gyurica – a fact unknown to his companions – is a fighter in the anti-fascist resistance. Not only does he raise his three children as a widower, he also shelters the persecuted in his home; he is responsible for twelve children in total, the same number as Jesus’s disciples. Through this act he bursts the narrow framework of the parable and the small-man conception of history. In the conclusion, the novel also answers how these ordinary men behave when thrust out of everyday life into an extraordinary situation. It is this dramatic situation that allows true knowledge of the characters, for here they must act, revealing their innermost qualities. It also becomes clear that each decision is individual. Three of the craftsmen choose heroic death rather than commit the inhumanity demanded by the Arrow Cross. Gyurica, however, must commit it so that the twelve children may survive.
Connected to the central question of Sánta’s writings – how should one live? – is the issue of whether human beings can be happy at all. The first question could also be phrased thus: what is the meaning and purpose of human existence? According to the writer’s ethics, the answer is happiness. Negative historical experiences cast doubt on whether this is attainable. Az áruló (lit. The Traitor) asked whether happiness could be achieved and ultimately left the question unanswered. In Az ötödik pecsét (lit. The Fifth Seal), the issue is secondary in this form, but the answer is given, affirmatively. The answer is most unambiguous in the world of Húsz óra (lit. Twenty Hours), published in 1964. Here, historical and ethical action become closely aligned. The chosen material – the roughly twenty-year history of a Hungarian village after 1945 – proves fortunate for a new kind of answer at a moment of historical promise. The work exemplifies the fate of a relatively closed community while also serving as a typical mirror of Hungarian history. At its centre lies a double transformation of peasant life: the land redistribution of 1945 and the lasting establishment of cooperative farming around the turn of the 1950s and 1960s.
The novel is divided into twenty chapters. In each, through the poetic use of reportage-like and sociographic devices, we come to know one or two destinies and characters. Yet the work does not fragment into a cycle of short stories. This is prevented not only by the shared experiences of those living in a single village community, not only by the fact that they all speak of the same people and events, but also by the fact that they speak differently, from different perspectives, about the same things. This enables truth to emerge as fully as possible and an objective picture of each character to form. Such multi-perspectivity allows the novel, over two hundred pages, to evoke the fullness of great novelistic currents.
This is also aided by its conception of time. Húsz óra (lit. Twenty Hours) is centred on past (1956) and present (1962), from which it looks back to the earlier past (1945–1956) and forward to the expected near future. It does not depict imagined future events but shows which tendencies already germinating in the present foreshadow a better future, and which elements of the present should not be allowed to survive into it. At the centre of the novel’s future vision stands genuine democracy. We know that this did not come to pass; liberalising and dictatorial tendencies characterised the Kádár regime throughout in wave-like motion. Ultimately, the 1960s could not become marvellous; the historical moment – what Gyula Illyés called the “lee-side situation” – passed without result. Yet the novel is an authentic document of that hope, shared by almost the entire country, while in its factual material and symbolic motifs it also intimates the abundance of regressive forces, bad tendencies among the politicians of the era and, more generally, within human nature itself. Human brotherhood is a beautiful ideal, yet in every historical era it is threatened by the possibility that human beings may turn into wolves to one another.
The explanation for Ferenc Sánta’s silence – more precisely, his withdrawal from public literary life – is essentially the same, in psychological terms, as that for his initial emergence. At that time, disillusioned with the dictatorship that dismantled the era of “bright winds”, he believed he could not remain silent, that he was obliged to speak the truth. The revolution of 1956 and its bloody suppression first rendered him mute, then led him to find the most decisive forms of truth-telling possible in that era. The consolidation of the 1960s temporarily filled him with hope, but he soon saw through the fact that democracy was merely a set, and that although people lived better, they – and society as a whole – were becoming increasingly ill. The writer worked on three further novels and wrote a play about the last days of Sándor Petőfi. Some excerpts were published, but he felt – and testified to this – that if he could not weave the idea of hope into these bitter events, he would have to renounce the texts. One novel project was set in contemporary everyday life, in an intellectual milieu. Another bore the working title Tutaj (lit. Raft), examining the fate of survivors of a shipwreck two hundred years earlier, the organisation of a micro-society, and the reasons why some die and others live. The third novel was Szürke kő (lit. Grey Stone). Several excerpts appeared, allowing partial reconstruction of the work, which is set in a Muslim environment, in a village enclosed by high mountains, in an almost idyllic setting. Its central idea is non-intervention in the affairs of others, of strangers, and the shifting of responsibility – a key issue of the twentieth century. Although they are able to do so, the villagers do not rescue the prisoners escorted by guards, and divine punishment follows: an enormous grey rock collapses and buries the entire village. It is beyond doubt that the completion and publication of these works would have enriched the oeuvre. Yet the oeuvre is complete even so; Ferenc Sánta created a “strict minimum” from many possibilities.
Budapest [2015]